An outage that has brought down The New York Times’ website for some of the site’s users appears to be the result of a “malicious external attack,” according to a Times spokeswoman, cautioning that the assessment was still preliminary.

The Times is working to fix the problem, she said.

The Times website went down around 3:30 p.m. ET in New York and elsewhere, sending people to Twitter to inquire about the outage. Many of the tweets were warmed over jokes from two weeks ago, when the Times experienced its last website outage. It blamed that episode on a regularly scheduled internal update.